NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT is renowned for exceptional performance at affordable price-points. While this chip is one year old and seems like it is time for it to leave, the market is still looking forward the GeForce 6600 GT and considers it to be the best performance-mainstream solution. This is a reason why ASUS decided to introduce its new passive SilentCool cooler along with its GeForce 6600 GT-based graphics card, which is, by the way, one of a few GeForce 6600 GT products with 256MB of memory.

Each game was set to provide maximum image quality, similar for ATI and NVIDIA solutions. If the game offered any pre-integrated options for testing, such as demo recording and fast playback with the fps scores monitoring, we used them. In all other cases we resorted to FRAPS utility. WE tried to measure not only the average fps rate but also the minimum framerate achieved by the testing participants, which allows us to better evaluate the performance.

If the game allowed adjusting the full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings, we enabled FSAA 4x + AF 16x by appropriate settings. Otherwise we forced the necessary mode from the driver of the graphics accelerator. If the gaming engine didn’t support FSAA, we didn’t run the tests in eye candy mode at all.

Besides the ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer/HTD, we have also tested the following graphics cards: